A multitude of major trends is drastically reshaping the IT landscape. The workforce is changing: the typical worker is now highly mobile. Rather than working on a desktop within the corporate network, they are now adopting a multitude of devices and cloud applications to use both inside and outside of the office—often without IT knowledge. Because of this, a large amount of corporate data is no longer residing primarily within the corporate firewall. IT is changing: they are moving away from traditional, on-premise servers and solutions to “cloud” and Software-as-a-Service solutions, replacing large upfront deals with smaller, incremental buys. The computer industry itself is changing: the internet is becoming the de facto corporate network. This has radically changed many of the long-held distinctions between solutions and the environments in which they are expected to work. Basic concepts such as segmenting solutions across the Internet, an Intranet, and an Extranet are outdated. Solutions which are architected assuming these outdated environments are now obsolete.
Traditional file management solutions are built for the outdated environment of the intranet, focused on managing files on file servers behind corporate firewalls. They don't work for this new environment in which data is being stored across not just traditional servers within the corporate network, but also and desktops, laptops, mobile devices, cloud applications and cloud stores that are located on the internet. Each of these is currently its own unmanageable island.
Cloud computing solutions are arising to provide solutions where data can be stored. Current solutions pursue strategies of data lock-in with a single-stack world. As storage is being commoditized, others have focused on how to have customers upload as much data into their stacks as possible as a means of differentiation. Each stack operates entirely independently of one another, effectively meaning customers will have to manage not just a multitude of computers and devices but now also a variety of cloud applications. This complexity is one that customers will ultimately resist.